Amaretto Sour Recipe, An Upgrade by Jeffrey Morgenthaler

As the years go by, our taste buds change. Sometimes, that change makes us appreciate drinks we didn't enjoy before. An Amaretto Sour is definitely one of those drinks.

I can't tell you when or where I had my first Amaretto Sour. But, I know who I was with. A long time ago, I dated a woman whose drinks of choice were typical dive bar classics.

I'm talking about Alabama Slammers, Amaretto Sours, Tequila Sunrises, and the like: sugary drinks made with cheap ingredients.

Amaretto Sour Recipe

Maybe this is surprising, but I didn't really drink until I was in my late 20s. It was cheap beer, rail liquor and soda, or one of my ex's sugary mixed drinks if I did.

Fast forward to my 30s, when I started to learn how to make cocktails. I couldn't figure out why people liked Amaretto Sours.

All I could think of when people would order them was the taste of cheap amaretto liqueur, cheap sour mix, and a neon cherry garnish.

So I made one, and I still wasn't a fan.

Jeffrey Morgenthaler's Upgrade Amaretto Sour

Until a couple of years ago, when I came across Jeffrey Morgenthaler's amaretto sour recipe while watching some of the now popular YouTube channels making this drink. I was blown away. It sounded delicious. Like everything I wanted a drink to be. And it used an egg white and bourbon!!

Jeffrey Morgenthaler is a bartender out of Portland, Oregon. He's been bartending since 1996 and writing about cocktails since 2004 or longer.

In case you needed more incentive to try his Amaretto Sour recipe, he was voted one of the 17 most influential bartenders in the past 100 years.

I'm not even top 17 in my 3 humans and 1 cat household, so that's definitely a significant accomplishment in my book.

Cask strength bourbon, fresh lemon juice, and an egg white set his recipe apart. High-quality ingredients really do make all the difference.

Cask strength bourbon is the true hero of the cocktail and clocks in at over 110 proof. I do not have any of that around my bar and wanted to make the drink a little more approachable. So I used Knob Creek 100 proof bourbon, which paired nicely with the Disaronno I used instead of the dive bar amaretto liqueur.

After dry and wet shaking, I strain the cocktail into a coupe glass and garnish it with a Luxardo cherry. It's not neon, and that's a good thing.